Chapter I: Introductory

Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson

The ancient and famous metropolis of the North sits overlooking a
windy estuary from the slope and summit of three hills. No situation could be
more commanding for the head city of a kingdom; none better chosen for noble
prospects. From her tall precipice and terraced gardens she looks far and wide
on the sea and broad champaigns. To the east you may catch at sunset the spark
of the May lighthouse, where the Firth expands into the German Ocean; and away
to the west, over all the carse of Stirling, you can see the first
snows upon Ben Ledi.

But Edinburgh
pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. She
is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched with
rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and powdered with the snow
as it comes flying southward from the Highland hills. The
weather is raw and
boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright
meteorological purgatory in the spring. The delicate die early, and I, as a
survivor, among bleak winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to
envy them their fate. For all who love shelter and the blessings of the sun,
who hate dark weather and perpetual tilting against squalls, there could
scarcely be found a more unhomely and harassing place of residence. Many such
aspire angrily after that Somewhere-else of the imagination, where all troubles
are supposed to end. They lean over the great bridge which joins the New Town
with the Old - that windiest spot, or high altar, in this northern temple of
the winds - and watch the trains smoking out from under them and vanishing into
the tunnel on a voyage to brighter skies. Happy the passengers who shake off
the dust of Edinburgh, and
have heard for the last time the cry of the east wind among her chimney-tops!
And yet the place establishes an interest in people's hearts; go where they
will, they find no city of the same distinction; go where they will, they take
a pride in their old home.

Venice, it has been said, differs from another cities in the
sentiment which she inspires. The rest may have admirers; she only, a famous
fair one, counts lovers in her train. And, indeed, even by her kindest friends,
Edinburgh is not considered
in a similar sense. These like her for many reasons, not any one of which is
satisfactory in itself. They like her whimsically, if you will, and somewhat as
a virtuoso dotes upon his cabinet. Her attraction is romantic in the narrowest
meaning of the term. Beautiful as she is, she is not so much beautiful as
interesting. She is pre-eminently Gothic, and all the more so since she has set
herself off with some Greek airs, and erected classic temples on her crags. In
a word, and above all, she is a curiosity. The Palace of Holyrood has been left
aside in the growth of Edinburgh, and stands grey and silent in a workman's
quarter and among breweries and gas works. It is a house of many memories.
Great people of yore, kings and queens, buffoons and grave ambassadors, played
their stately farce for centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing
has lasted deep into the night, - murder has been done in its chambers. There
Prince Charlie held his phantom levees, and in a very gallant manner
represented a fallen dynasty for some hours. Now, all these things of clay are
mingled with the dust, the king's crown itself is shown for sixpence to the
vulgar; but the stone palace has outlived these charges. For fifty weeks
together, it is no more than a show for tourists and a museum of old furniture;
but on the fifty-first, behold the palace reawakened and mimicking its past.
The Lord Commissioner, a kind of stage sovereign, sits among stage courtiers; a
coach and six and clattering escort come and go before the gate; at night, the
windows are lighted up, and its near neighbours, the workmen, may dance in
their own houses to the palace
music. And in this the
palace is typical. There is a spark among the embers; from time to time the old
volcano smokes. Edinburgh
has but partly abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her metropolitan
trappings. Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a
double existence; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like
the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble.
There are armed men and cannon in the citadel overhead; you may see the troops
marshalled on the high parade; and at night after the early winter even-fall,
and in the morning before the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over
Edinburgh the sound of drums and bugles. Grave judges sit bewigged in what was
once the scene of imperial deliberations. Close by in the High Street perhaps
the trumpets may sound about the stroke of noon; and you see a troop of
citizens in tawdry masquerade; tabard above, heather-mixture trowser below, and
the men themselves trudging in the mud among unsympathetic by-standers. The
grooms of a well-appointed circus tread the streets with a better presence. And
yet these are the Heralds and Pursuivants of Scotland, who are about to
proclaim a new law of the United Kingdom before two-score boys, and thieves,
and hackney-coachmen. Meanwhile every hour the bell of the University rings out
over the hum of the streets, and every hour a double tide of students, coming
and going, fills the deep archways. And lastly, one night in the springtime -
or say one morning rather, at the peep of day - late folk may hear voices of
many men singing a psalm in unison from a church on one side of the old High
Street; and a little after, or perhaps a little before, the sound of many men
singing a psalm in unison from another church on the opposite side of the way.
There will be something in the words above the dew of Hermon, and how goodly it
is to see brethren dwelling together in unity. And the late folk will tell
themselves that all this singing denotes the conclusion of two yearly
ecclesiastical parliaments - the parliaments of Churches which are brothers in
many admirable virtues, but not specially like brothers in this particular of a
tolerant and peaceful life.

Again, meditative people will find a charm in a certain consonancy
between the aspect of the city and its odd and stirring history. Few places, if
any, offer a more barbaric display of contrasts to the eye. In the very midst
stands one of the most satisfactory crags in nature - a Bass Rock upon dry
land, rooted in a garden shaken by passing trains, carrying a crown of
battlements and turrets, and describing its war-like shadow over the liveliest
and brightest thoroughfare of the new town. From their smoky beehives, ten
stories high, the unwashed look down upon the open squares and gardens of the
wealthy; and gay people sunning themselves along Princes Street, with its mile
of commercial palaces all beflagged upon some great occasion, see, across a
gardened valley set with statues, where the washings of the Old Town flutter in
the breeze at its high windows. And then, upon all sides, what a clashing of
architecture! In this one valley, where the life of the town goes most busily
forward, there may be seen, shown one above and behind another by the accidents
of the ground, buildings in almost every style upon the globe. Egyptian and
Greek temples, Venetian palaces and Gothic spires, are huddled one over another
in a most admired disorder; while, above all, the brute mass of the
Castle and the summit
of Arthur's Seat look
down upon these imitations with a becoming dignity, as the works of Nature may
look down the monuments of Art.
But Nature is a more indiscriminate patroness than we imagine, and in no way
frightened of a strong effect. The birds roost as willingly among the
Corinthian capitals as in the crannies of the crag; the same atmosphere and
daylight clothe the eternal rock and yesterday's imitation portico; and as the
soft northern sunshine throws out everything into a glorified distinctness - or
easterly mists, coming up with the blue evening, fuse all these incongruous
features into one, and the lamps begin to glitter along the street, and faint
lights to burn in the high windows across the valley - the feeling grows upon
you that this also is a piece of nature in the most intimate sense; that this
profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock, is not a
drop-scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of every-day reality,
connected by railway and telegraph-wire with all the capitals of Europe, and
inhabited by citizens of the familiar type, who keep ledgers, and attend
church, and have sold their immortal portion to a daily paper. By all the
canons of romance, the place demands to be half deserted and leaning towards
decay; birds we might admit in profusion, the play of the sun and winds, and a
few gipsies encamped in the chief thoroughfare; but these citizens with their
cabs and tramways, their trains and posters, are altogether out of key.
Chartered tourists, they make free with historic localities, and rear their
young among the most picturesque sites with a grand human indifference. To see
them thronging by, in their neat clothes and conscious moral rectitude, and
with a little air of possession that verges on the absurd, is not the least
striking feature of the place.*

* These sentences have, I hear, given offence
in my native town, and a proportionable pleasure to our rivals of
Glasgow. I confess the news
caused me both pain and merriment. May I remark, as a balm for wounded fellow-
townsmen, that there is nothing deadly in my accusations? Small blame to them
if they keep ledgers: 'tis an excellent business habit. Churchgoing is not,
that ever I heard, a subject of reproach; decency of linen is a mark of
prosperous affairs, and conscious moral rectitude one of the tokens of good
living. It is not their fault it the city calls for something more specious by
way of inhabitants. A man in a frock-coat looks out of place upon an Alp or
Pyramid, although he has the virtues of a Peabody and the talents of a Bentham.
And let them console themselves - they do as well as anybody else; the
population of (let us say) Chicago would cut quite as rueful a figure on the
same romantic stage. To the Glasgow people I would say only one word, but that
is of gold; I have not yet written a book about
Glasgow.

And the story of the town is as eccentric as its appearance. For
centuries it was a capital thatched with heather, and more than once, in the
evil days of English invasion, it has gone up in flame to heaven, a beacon to
ships at sea. It was the jousting-ground of jealous nobles, not only on
Greenside, or by the King's Stables, where set tournaments were fought to the
sound of trumpets and under the authority of the royal presence, but in every
alley where there was room to cross swords, and in the main street, where
popular tumult under the Blue Blanket alternated with the brawls of outlandish
clansmen and retainers. Down in the palace
John Knox reproved his
queen in the accents of
modern democracy. In the town, in one of those little shops plastered like so
many swallows' nests among the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that familiar
autocrat, James VI, would
gladly share a bottle of wine with George Heriot the goldsmith. Up on the
Pentland Hills, that so quietly look down on the
Castle with the city
lying in waves around it, those mad and dismal fanatics, the Sweet Singers,
haggard from long exposure on the moors, sat day and night with 'tearful
psalmns' to see Edinburgh consumed with fire from heaven, like another Sodom or
Gomorrah. There, in the Grass-market, stiff-necked, covenanting heroes, offered
up the often unnecessary, but not less honourable, sacrifice of their lives,
and bade eloquent farewell to sun, moon, and stars, and earthly friendships, or
died silent to the roll of drums. Down by yon outlet rode
Grahame of Claverhouse
and his thirty dragoons, with the town beating to arms behind their horses'
tails - a sorry handful thus riding for their lives, but with a man at the head
who was to return in a different temper, make a dash that staggered Scotland to
the heart, and die happily in the thick of fight. There Aikenhead was hanged
for a piece of boyish incredulity; there, a few years afterwards,
David Hume ruined Philosophy
and Faith, an undisturbed and well-reputed citizen; and thither, in yet a few
years more, Burns came from
the plough-tail, as to an academy of gilt unbelief and artificial letters.
There, when the great exodus was made across the valley, and the New Town began
to spread abroad its draughty parallelograms, and rear its long frontage on the
opposing hill, there was such a flitting, such a change of domicile and
dweller, as was never excelled in the history of cities: the cobbler succeeded
the earl; the beggar ensconced himself by the judge's chimney; what had been a
palace was used as a pauper refuge; and great mansions were so parcelled out
among the least and lowest in society, that the hearthstone of the old
proprietor was thought large enough to be partitioned off into a bedroom by the
new.